Chapter Twenty-Seven
Effie…
I’d know that snarky alto voice anywhere. I turn around and spot two of my sisters.
Juniper is standing there, a sweet smile on her face, her freckles highlighted by some glitter magic and her strawberry-blond hair pulled back into a bouncy high ponytail.
She’s in head to toe pink with a splash of bright yellow here and there for contrast. Her hot pink cat eyeglasses—necessary because of all the time she spends reading the cramped, twisty text of old and forgotten spell books—hang from a gold chain around her neck.
Most people look at Juniper and all they see is a naive nerd, but there’s steel underneath all the cotton candy fluff.
Bea, on the other hand, has, per usual, matched her sky-high heels to the color of the eye patch covering her left eye (today’s color is teal).
Her deep red hair falls in glamour waves to the middle of her back, held in place with a no-knot spell that she perfected in fourth grade after one particularly painful post-bath comb-out.
She looks, as always, like she just might be an assassin or the meanest teacher in your high school—possibly both.
She pretends to be all that and an extra dash of bitchy, but underneath forty layers of hard bedrock, she is a total softie.
All my aches and pains from Kyle’s magic bolts melt away as if they’d never been there, and I run toward my sisters.
“Juniper! Bea!” I throw my arms around them. “You came.”
“Of course we did,” Juniper says, squeezing me hard and wrapping me in her sugar-cookie magic to speed up my healing. “It’s what sisters do.”
“We would have been here sooner if your SOS spell hadn’t been so janky,” Bea says after stepping back to look me over, her analytical mind no doubt cataloging all my injuries before they disappear and putting them on her things-to-avenge list. “It took three tries to figure out your messed-up Morse code.”
She’s such a pain in the ass, and I wouldn’t have her any other way.
“Well,” I say, “I was under some pressure and doing the spell by sign language behind my back while facing down a bunch of angry werewolves and a Council witch.”
Juniper rolls her eyes. “Don’t listen to Bea. She’s just grumpy because Barkley hid her favorite eye patch again.” She smiles at me, making me warm from the inside out. “You did wonderfully.”
Kyle clears his throat and says in what he probably thinks is his most intimidating tone, “You three are to face the Council’s judgment.”
Darius, still in half werewolf form, steps forward, moving between the Council witches and us.
He still has a few bruises, but it’s amazing how fast shifters can heal.
Emitting a low, dangerous growl, he flexes his arms down toward the ground and his long, onyx-colored claws emerge one at a time.
He may be a man of few words, but he really doesn’t have to say a whole lot to get his message across, considering how the three Council witches behind Kyle are now profusely sweating.
Bea cranes her neck so she can see around Darius and lets out a disgusted snort. “Is that Kyle from the Hex Depot?”
Juniper looks around Darius’s other side to see for herself.
“I don’t work there anymore,” Kyle says, sounding as petulant as a toddler being told that he can’t have chocolate chip cookie cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“Did you two hear something?” Bea asks as she turns around to face us. There’s so much sarcasm dripping from her words it’s practically tangible. “It was this annoying whiny sound.”
“Yes, it’s Kyle,” I say, trying not to laugh because despite the healing spell, it would hurt my ribs, which got nailed with a direct hit by one of Kyle’s bolts. “And he’s been joined by some of his Council friends.”
“Oh, like a playdate.” Bea claps her hands together with gleeful mocking. “How wonderful for them.”
In front of us, Darius chuckles—a sound that makes me go all soft and gooey in the middle.
Juniper slips her arm into the crook of my elbow and draws me close. “You okay?” she asks, keeping her volume low enough that the others can’t hear.
“I’ll live,” I say as quietly as possible as Bea continues to mock the Council witches. “Not that I’m not grateful you’re here, but where is everyone else?”
“Leona and Erik are taking care of the you-know-what,” she says before mouthing the words “getting The Liber Umbrarum to the secure facility” as if I hadn’t been able to unwind her code, “but everyone else will be here soon.” She leans in close. “There was a thing.”
My gut clenches. “A thing?”
“Barkley,” she says. “It’s a long story.”
Of course it is. I let out a breath, and my body relaxes—well, as much as it can in our current standoff.
Bea’s rooster familiar seems to delight in stirring up trouble and throwing everything into chaos, so I’m not surprised there’s been a Barkley-related delay.
Juniper jerks her chin toward Darius. “So who’s the werewolf?”
Okay, that is a short question with a long-ass answer, but this isn’t the time for it. Later I’ll give her the full rundown, but for now, all I say is, “The alpha of the Aetos pack.”
Juniper’s eyes go wide. “So it’s like Griselda said.”
Griselda is a three-hundred-year-old sprite who seems to have her finger in every pie in Witchingdom and knows everything about everyone. She’s also been stuck in her grunge era for the past century.
The fact that Griselda has been talking about me has the hairs on the back of my neck going all prickly. “What are you talking about?”
Juniper looks around Darius to the Council witches who are trying to defend themselves against Bea’s snark attack without realizing that the whole time she is smack-talking them she’s also controlling the tree roots, calling them upward from the ground so they are slowly winding themselves around the witches’ ankles.
“When you went after Leona,” Juniper says as we watch the roots do their thing, “Griselda said we needed to give you your space because the Fates had plans for you; they always had. She said you’d return as your complete self and with a full heart—and a tail.”
Inside me, my wolf stops pacing and lifts her head before shaking her fur out as if she’s getting ready for a photo shoot.
“Sounds to me like she got into her tequila stash again,” I grumble.
Bea lifts a hand and flicks a static charge of magic at us. “Are you two going to keep whispering, or are we going to take care of these dumbasses?”
“We are not dumbasses,” Kyle protests, his voice breaking on the last word. “We are the Council.”
Bea doubles over with a belly laugh. “You four are losers, pissed off that the world doesn’t think you’re as brilliant as your moms said you were. Breaking news, your moms lied. You’re dumbasses.”
“My mother doesn’t lie,” one of the other Council witches says.
“Chad?” Beatrice takes a closer look at the witch and presses her hand to her chest in shock. “Does your mom know what you’re doing? She would not like it. Not at all.”
“It’s not Chad,” he whines. “It’s Fortis.”
“Yeah, they’ve all given themselves alt names,” I tell my sisters. “Kyle is Formido now.”
“What are you two?” Bea adjusts her eye patch, lifting it enough that she can wink at the roots with her all-seeing eye, letting them know now is the time to tighten. “Dipshit and Dipshittier?”
“Captiosus,” says one, completely clueless that he now has a tree root shackle.
“Bellator,” says the other, who is equally oblivious.
“Wooooo-ooooo-ow,” Bea says, drawing the word out in mock amazement. “You went all in on the junior Latin explorers club, didn’t you?”
“Enough,” Kyle thunders, his cheeks bright red with a mix of anger and humiliation. “You will respect us.”
“That’s not how that works,” Juniper says with a shake of her head. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t try to tell Bea what to do. She doesn’t take it well.”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” I say.
Trust me, it’s too long a story to tell you now, but Barkley wasn’t always Barkley, and yeah, Bea is not one to be messed with.
Bea glares at me. “Not the time, Effie.”
See? I told you.
Bea turns to Darius. “So you’re the Aetos alpha?”
He nods.
She gives him her scariest smile. “Hurt my sister, and I’ll end you.”
“Bea,” I gasp. “What did you say a minute ago about this not being the time?”
She shrugs.
“Hello,” Kyle yells. “We are a part of the Council, and we’ve given you an order.”
“Oh, shut up, Kyle,” Bea says, not taking her eyes off Darius and me, “the adults are talking.”
I may be the oldest sister, but Bea is the most stubborn, and when it comes to the Sherwood sisters, that’s saying something. The only way to get past this is just to give it up.
“We’re fated mates,” I tell her and Juniper.
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, my first thought is how perfectly true they are.
My second is that Artemis is about to deliver a well-earned told you so.
Darius and I look around at the same time.
He flinches at the exact moment when my stomach drops down to my toes.
Everything happened so fast and all at once that this is the first moment we’ve had to look around and see that Artemis isn’t here—if she was actually in-the-flesh here in the first place.
Neither, I realize, is Nikos. While I thought he was passed out, the asshole must have woken up and run home to the actual (not magic holograph) Arcadia.
Fuck.
This is not good.
“We have to go get Artemis,” Darius and I say at the same time.
Bea flicks her wrist and magicks the Sherwood family cauldron out of thin air. It lands in front of her and Juniper with a gentle thud. The liquid spell inside it is already bubbling, and the power wafting off it makes my skin buzz.
Usually, we brew up our most significant hexes in the kitchen as a family using the cauldron that’s belonged to the Sherwoods for hundreds of years.
Each of us holds hands as we work the spell, and you can feel the generations that came before you, the family members scattered across the globe, and the hope for the future flowing through from one Sherwood to the next.
I’ve never seen the cauldron outside our house before, and the fact that Bea and Juniper brought it with them means they are about to work some amazing magic. I almost hate to miss it, but we need to help Artemis.
Now.
“Oh, don’t worry about us,” Juniper says before a ladle appears out of nowhere.
“We’ve been cooking since Leona told us you’d taken off after the Aetos pack to retrieve The Liber Ubrarum—never mind that she’d totally swapped it out for one of Barkley’s feathers.
Oh my, she always has something up her sleeve. I love it.”
“Juniper here broke out some of her most arcane spells to make sure the Council can’t dodge the hex,” Bea says in a tone that should make the Council witches think twice about their life choices.
“What are you going to do?” Darius asks.
Bea grins, and I’m not sure if it’s her teal eye patch, the emotion of the moment, or exhaustion from running the blue moon gauntlet, but it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.
“Only what these assholes deserve.” Then she takes the ladle from Juniper and starts to stir the contents of the cauldron as the Sherwood family magic, in the form of a purple steam, rises. It swirls higher and higher until it’s above the tree line.
The Council witches flinch and look over their shoulders toward where the woods grow dark as the trees thicken as if calculating if they can do the flying witch bounce that far.
Yeah, fellas, that ship has sailed. You are right proper fucked.
“Whatever you two do to them,” I tell Juniper, “put it up on my WitchyGram. Show folks that these assholes aren’t invincible—not even close.”
“You got it,” she says with a grin that has a lot more spice than sweetness. “Now go.”